A to Z Challenge 2014 – H is for Horror

  When I was younger I remember those happy days spent loitering in the library, I would spend ages choosing which books I wanted and as I read quite quickly I found I had soon exhausted any interesting books in the children’s section.  My love of reading was further increased when I discovered the Horror section and the books of Stephen King and James Herbert.

I loved to delve into the dark recesses of the human psyche, though of course back then I would have just said I loved being scared, but even so early on I learned to differentiate between types of horror.  I write ghost stories but they are not really scary, not what I would class as horror scary.

And if I am honest I find very few films these days that claim to be scary actually are frightening at all, most tend towards the more gore the better approach rather than the hairs standing up terror of true horror.  I think that is where horror on the page has always had an advantage over its on the screen counterpart.  Real horror lurks in the unknown, hidden in the shadows. It is not the reality of seeing death or bodies cut up that really scares it is the point before that, it is the waiting for the killer to pounce, the cat and mouse game as the prey is stalked, the terror of silence, of a single footstep behind you.

In the Eighties then even gorified that British Horror institution the Hammer House of Horror

Horror is not about what you can see it is about all the things that are just out of sight and could potentially happen.  I really wish film makers would go back and read some old fashioned proper horror and then maybe they would make a film or two that really would leave people afraid to close their eyes.

I am off to write a horror story now to submit to an anthology so fingers crossed….